Tweeting falcons

We were recently approached by the RSPB in Manchester to help out with the Manchester Peregrines Project, which runs every spring in partnership with Manchester City Council and the BBC.

The Manchester Peregrines Project give members of the public the opportunity to view a wild pair of breeding peregrine falcons, which nest on one of the buildings in city centre Manchester, using telescopes and with the guidance and knowledge of RSPB experts.

Through a referral from Jeremy Buxton, the Big Screen Manager at the BBC, the RSPB wanted to know if we could help them put live video of the nesting falcons on the internet for more people to see.

We thought this was a great idea. Provided we could connect the camera to the internet, getting the live video put online would be fairly simple via a service such as Ustream.

However, we hit a snag when we found out that the internet connection at the building where the nest site was located was a domestic ADSL connection with less than 400kbit upload speed. That speed would not be enough to support live video from the nest, so our next thought was seeing if we could connect the building to our experimental public WiFi network.

The WiFi network – known to us as Manchester Public WiFi – is a pilot project MDDA is running which uses low cost equipment to distribute and share the high speed internet connection that comes into MDDA’s offices to provide free WiFi access at many locations across Manchester, including Albert Square, Manchester Art Gallery, Firmstart and the MadLab. (I’ll be posting more about the Manchester Public Wifi network soon.)

The first step was visiting the nest site again to see if it would be possible to connect it to our WiFi network – part of which involved sticking a phone out on a ledge and taking a cheeky snap of the nest whilst one of the falcons had its back turned.

We found out that we could “see” the WiFi network from site. We had power for the camera and our equipment, and the camera-mount used in previous years looked fine, so we were OK to go for the live video. Also, we could improve the upload speed from the 400kbit of the ADSL connection to 50Mbit on our WiFi network – over 100 times faster.

The next step was helping the RSPB choose a good video camera for the job. We ended up with a camera that could send its video over a computer network (just like a webcam can), could record in high definition, do fancy tricks like motion detection (more about that in a minute) and work without a hitch in the glorious Manchester sunshine.

Once the camera was in place and connected to our network, we started work on getting the video off it and onto the internet. We needed to do a few things with the video coming from the camera:

• Stream live video over the internet for anyone to watch
• Upload short video clips

But given that this was something a bit special – wild peregrine falcons nesting in city centre Manchester live on the internet! – what else could we do?

Hang on. Falcons? Internet? How about getting the falcons on Twitter? And how about any time something interesting happens in front of the camera we record a short video clip, put the clips from the falcons’ nest on Flickr and let the falcons tweet about it? Sounds like a plan!

So we set up some user accounts on Flickr, Twitter and Ustream (as Perry Grin!) and got to work on the camera.

Streaming live video

Streaming live video to a lot of people takes more internet bandwidth than we have available on our public WiFi network, so we used a third-party web service – in this case a free account on UStream – to help distribute the live video of the nesting falcons over the web.

We used an application called Wirecast on an old Mac Mini in our office to grab the live video from the camera (a bit like how you can take the live video from a webcam when you plug it into a PC).

Wirecast then sent the video on to the falcons account on Ustream. It was then Ustream’s job (as they’ve got the internet “oomph”) to stream the live video to anyone who wanted to watch it.

Ustream lets us add a chat box to the falcon’s live video page. This has been great for the RSPB as it’s enabled them to engage in conversations with people interested in things like when the peregrines chicks will fledge, when Incy Wincy the Spider (who crawls across the camera at night) has gone and inspire drawings of the chicks.

Using Ustream enabled us to get statistics as well, so we know that (at the time of writing) there’s been over 30,000 unique viewers to the live video stream since early April 2011, amounting to almost 15,500 hours of video watched in total.

Uploading short video clips and tweeting about them

As well as the live video, we thought it would be interesting to grab short clips of interesting things going on at the nest site and automatically upload them to the photo sharing website Flickr and then let the falcons tweet about them on Twitter.

The video camera we chose has a feature called motion detection. This allows the camera to automatically trigger the recording of a video clip if something moves in front of the lens.

We set the camera up so that a 25-second long video clip would be recorded if something happened around the edges of the falcons nest.

As the camera has a “pre-roll” feature (which means it remembers the last few seconds of video in its memory) it starts the recording a few seconds before the action actually begins, so we don’t miss something interesting like one of the parents landing with some new food for the chicks.

The camera saves the short video clips to its own SD card, just like on a regular digital camera, but also uploads them over the public WiFi network to a server at MDDA’s offices.

Automatically putting those video clips on Flickr and putting messages about them on Twitter involved getting lots of different web things working together and a simple computer program – as explained in the science bit below.

The science bit

When the motion sensor is triggered on the video camera, it records a 25-second long video clip, saves it to its own SD card for back up, and then uploads that clip via FTP to a server at MDDA’s offices.

Each clip is an MP4 video file between 2.5Mb and 4Mb in size, has a resolution of 1280 by 720 pixels, a framerate of around 12 frames per second and a filename something like nest-motion20110602_103743.mp4.

A simple computer program is scheduled to run every hour on the MDDA server. The program checks if a new clip have arrived since the last time it was run and if one has arrived, it gets uploaded to the falcons’ account on Flickr via the Flickr API.

Using the Flickr API lets the computer program do things like set the title, description and tags to describe the video clip, get the web address of the clip’s page on Flickr and be notified when the video has been processed by Flickr and is ready to watch.

After the clip has been processed by Flickr, we have the address of the clip’s web page (its URL) on Flickr. However, as we’re going to be using Twitter to tell people about the new clip, and as Twitter limits messages to 140 characters, we have to use a URL shortening service to turn a long web page address (such as http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcrperegrines/5789934452) into a short one that is good for Twitter (such as http://s.coop/1oio).

There many URL shortening services, and we decided to use s.coop, which has been created by the Co-operative Press based right here in Manchester. Like Flickr, s.coop has an API which lets computer programs interact directly with the service. So our program used the s.coop API to turn the long web page address of the video clip into a shorter one ready for use on Twitter.

Now that our program has got the short web page address from s.coop, it’s almost ready to tweet about the clip on the falcons’ Twitter account.

We didn’t really want the falcons to send tweets like “Video clip #23746273846 has been uploaded to Flickr”, so we asked the RSPB to provide some phrases that the program could use when sending the tweet. The program picks one of the phrases at random when sending the tweet, which means we could send tweets like, “Ah, another home movie from the life of a Manchester peregrine. http://s.coop/1oio“.

Like Flickr and s.coop, Twitter has an API, which we used to send the tweet about the new video clip that’s just been uploaded to Flickr.

So, to recap, here’s what happens:

• Something happens in front of the camera and triggers the motion sensor
• The camera records a short video clip and uploads it to a server at MDDA
• The MDDA server runs a computer program that uploads the clip the Flickr, makes a short URL of the web page on Flickr and then sends a tweet about it to the falcon’s Twitter account.

All this science bit takes about three minutes, and most of that is waiting for Flickr to process the video ready for viewing.

Falcon figures and popular peregrines

Using Ustream, Twitter and Flickr to share images and live video of the Manchester falcons has helped the RSPB reach more people.

Though the project’s use of social networking sites like Flickr and Twitter has been quite low profile, since this year’s project went live in April 2011 (and at the time of writing) the falcons have over 280 followers on Twitter, over 27,000 views on Flickr and over 30,000 unique viewers on Ustream.

Find out more

You can find out more about the RSPB’s work by visiting A Date With Nature and following the RSPB on Twitter.

You can follow the Manchester peregrine falcons on Twitter, Flickr and Ustream.

Thanks to Joanna Keene, Emily Sanders, Richard Bashford, Carolyn Jarvis, Brian Reid and everyone else at the RSPB. The MDDA stuff was done by Paul Spensley, Paul Limbrick and Alan Holding.